From Æther

I grew up not giving out my info to random strangers online. If you random person finding my blog thinks I need to be blocked because I dont have a list of all my personal info or whatever, fucking go ahead.

[kaylmao]

has anyone seen my pet bacteriophage its name is styrofoam and its about [hand touching the floor] this tall

[nmbrs]

is this it

[afurioushawk]

Euros over here for the World Cup discovering we were right about this

[archaeocoyote]

[mindllessdreaming]

and the winner of superwholock is officially??? no one. we all lost. congrats team

[buggyhuman-blog]

[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[made-in-manetheren]

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

[alianoralacanta]

5. If the words are Google's, this solidifies the position of universities who demand that all answers from AI are fully cited. If all the in-line citations now have to be (Google, 2026), that's going to make it obvious when someone's trying to use Google as a source. There's still the difficulty with people who are academically dishonest by trying to pass off the AI writing as their own. 6. 91% accuracy is officially too low to use as a source of references, which means the AI can't be used as a source of references either. This makes it less legitimate for such purposes than Wikipedia of all places (Wikipedia might need date/time proof of when it was accessed for the reference to be valid, but at least it is possible to prove the link existed at a particular date and time). 7. This will help encourage the rollout of courses on how to avoid AI search for students who need academic accuracy, because it's statistically not good enough to use. 8. This strengthens the case intellectual property authors have against Google in the EU, as this is proof that an intellectual property transfer took place.

[shotofchinaco]

Brian McFadden: Is Google Cooked? (via Daily Kos)

[bruzum]

[lastvalyrian]

This is literally what people are talking about when they say AI will be used to mainstream widely held bigotry. LLMs are trained on frequency and probability -> straight relationships are more well represented in the dataset -> straight pronouns and terms become the "correct" normal.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

Combine this with the mass of people inclined to believe (and being encouraged to believe) that if AI says and does something it must be correct

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[bluwubewwy]

The fact that you can accidentally swipe on a tiny ui element and dm a post to a random person is unhinged

[clairenovvak]

fanservice sucks bc it’s never you that’s being serviced it’s always some other really annoying fan

[tibets]

here is a corner of a room that has a penis and balls

[tibets]

i have truly posted some things online

[karaagehime]

to the window to the walls to the corner dick and balls

[kushblazer666]

nothing pisses me off more than a proud “no msg!” label on something. shut up you dumb bitch put the msg back in there so it tastes good. idiot

[nudityandnerdery]

From the media that brought you "Millennials are killing [insert industry here]" articles for years and years and years, now we have....

"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."

This is a goddamn dystopia, we know this, right?

[rabid-transcendentalist]

[piercingcomet]

[ID: image 1 and 2: text from an article titled: What is a micro-retirement? Inside the latest Gen Z trend

Micro-retirements might impact your financial future and career progression but DIFTP

While retirement typically occurs, after completing a career and saving and investing for it, a new trend is emerging among Gen Z career professionals called "micro-retirement." Micro-retirements involve taking a one to two-week break from work every 12 to 18 months.

image three: an edited comic panel of two cats talking to each other. the first approaches the other to say "i think this micro-retirement might impact your financial future and career progression"

the second responds, with a smile and a blank stare. it says "you mean the fucking annual 1-2 week vacation?"

/end ID]

[rivercreature]

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.

[junglejim4322]

It’s crazy that most people don’t realize alcohol is one of the only drugs that has fatal withdrawal like the prevalence of people thinking the answer is to dump people’s liquor into the sink to “help” them is insane

[rui-cifer]

like, the USA in general is a prticularly reactionary country, and a lot of yanks have never fully grasped it because they've never been outside of their suburb. The USA sends more Christian missionaries of all denominations than any other nation in the world combined, spreading its message of hate and bigotry where their media won't reach them. this is why they have to look for nefarious intents and mechanisms in other countries; they live inundated in a country that just does that more than anywhere else in the world.

[me----irl]

Reblog if you think the person you reblogged this from deserves to be happy.